


The Car

by Feneris



Category: Gravity Falls, Transcendence AU - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Transcendence, But Know A Lot About Magic, Cars, Gen, Improvised Repairs, Necromacy, People Who Know A Lot About Cars, People Who Know Nothing About Cars
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-04
Updated: 2016-04-04
Packaged: 2018-05-31 05:22:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,233
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6457522
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Feneris/pseuds/Feneris
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>David and Sarah knew nothing about cars. But they knew a lot about magic. Therefore it should have been no surprise that when their car first broke down, they used magic to fix it. </p><p>That knowledge however did nothing to prepare Greg when he first opened the hood of their car, and saw first hand what they had done to it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Car

**Author's Note:**

> Word of warning, while I know more about cars than David and Sarah, I still don't actually know much about automotive mechanics. Nor do I honestly have much of an interest in cars or vehicles beyond their sociological and cultural significance. 
> 
> I also finished editing this at 3:00am, so sure as shit there are going to be embarrassing typos I've missed.

Sarah and David were on vacation in Madagascar when Greg finally realized what needed to be done.

“I’m going the kill the car,” he announced to his wife, Isa.

“I’m assuming you don’t mean our car?” Isa replied. “Because I was thinking of taking the kids down to Florida in it.” 

“David and Sarah’s car,” Greg clarified. 

“I also assume you’re not planning to tell them you’re going to kill their car,” Isa continued. 

“It’s something that has to be done,” Greg explained. “Its… the… the things they’ve done to that car. I’m not just talking about the times they’ve ran a belt sander down the sides. They’re going to make some kind of monster out of it.”

\---

David and Sarah knew nothing about cars. The inner workings of the cosmos were clearer to them than anything that went on under the hood of their grey SUV. It didn’t help that circumstances beyond their control often led to them having to take drastic action with the car. Like driving it through the front doors of an abandoned Wal-Mart, or taking it off the road and through a willow thicket.

When the car first broke down, along the highway somewhere in Manitoba, they had popped open the hood and stared at the internal workings of the car in bewilderment.

That big square thing in front was spitting out steam, David had pointed out. It probably shouldn’t be doing that. 

Well, steam was evaporating water, so it stood to reason that something was either leaking or overheating. Probably both. David had ended up conjuring an arctic blizzard within the radiator and Sarah had contained the whole mess with a sealing rite. It seemed to work. It got them home. 

That one “repair” soon ended up becoming the template for all future “repairs” that followed. Look under the hood; identify what seemed to be belching out smoke, setting off sparks, making a funny noise, or on fire; and then “fix” the problem with a liberal application of sealing wards and elemental rites.

And if those didn’t work, there was always threats. A tire-iron to the hood seemed to work when nothing else would. They even kept a nasty looking fire-axe in the back for times when the tire-iron just wouldn’t cut it. Of course no amount of magic or threats could bring the car back to life when it died on the side of a country back-road in the middle of Wyoming. 

As luck would have it, they found themselves right in the middle of a dead zone. The only house within a hundred miles happened to be the headquarters of a demon worshiping cult of rednecks, who didn’t have phone, but were happy enough to show David and Sarah their collection of guns. 

Needless to say, when they got back to Gravity Falls, David and Sarah both agreed that the car needed to be punished for failing them in such a spectacular way. Sarah ended up running a belt sander down the car’s flanks, while David blew out the battery by throwing lightning bolts at it. 

Afterwards they had taken it to Greg to get it fixed. Greg was a car enthusiast and ran the local repair garage. AKA, the one the tourists didn’t know existed. That was the first time he had ever looked under the hood of their car. 

The whole thing was something out of a mechanic’s nightmare. Red gunk was leaking out of the cylinder caps from the time they topped off the car’s oil with sanguine oil from the grocery store; along with the remains of the ritual which suppressed the resulting fire. Bits of antler were everywhere from when they had hit the elk, five years ago. The radiator had more holes then swiss cheese and was bent inwards from when David rammed a parking meter. The brakes were completely gone, with only some kind of powerful stopping ward keeping them functioning. 

It cost David and Sarah over five grand to have Greg fix the car. In the end Greg had to outright replace nearly half the internal components, and have David help him unravel the complicated tangle of wards, charms and curses which were essentially still keeping the car together. 

In addition to the five grand, Greg insisted that David and Sarah sit down with him while he explained the basics of car repair. 

While Greg wasn’t sure how much of his lessons actually sunk in. But a part of him was optimistic that maybe David and Sarah wouldn’t simply repeat the same mistakes that had run the car into the ground in the first place. 

\---

“So we were about half-way through Arizona when the big blocky thing in the middle fell out,” David explained as he led Greg into the garage. 

“You mean the engine?” Greg asked as he felt around for the hood clasp. 

“I guess?” David shrugged. “We had to rig up a replacement in any case. But it seemed to work pretty good. It got us home.”

A shiver of apprehension went through Greg as he popped the hood and looked inside. “Is that a moose skull?”

“Horse actually. Moose don’t have upper incisors,” David answered. “You said cars measured output in horsepower right? We figured the symbolic connection would help support the whole array.”

“Please don’t tell you need to keep lighting the candles to get this thing started?” Greg muttered.

“Nah, too much of a pain. We just needed them to jump-start the enchantment cycle. Once we did that, the thunderstones we wired into the main body of the totem were enough to keep it going. Was a bitch making those though. First I had to find the obsidian, which was not easy, then I had to stand out in the desert with a lightning rod just to get them imbued.”

“Does this still run on gas at least?” Greg asked, desperation seeping into his voice.

“And wine and animal sacrifice,” David added. “We got nearly a thousand miles out of a two-liter bottle of cactus hooch Sarah’s grandpa made, and another five hundred when he hit a squirrel on the highway.” 

“ _Good gods._ What did you do about the transmission? Did it fall off with the engine?”

“The what?”

“Never mind.” 

\---

It only got worse from there. While David and Sarah never went as far as to imprison a spirit or demon in what now substituted for their engine block, everything else seemed to be fair game. Wards that could contain a low-level high demon, inertia and momentum inhibitors to compensate for failing brakes and balding tires, a localized blizzard now ragged inside the engine compartment in place of a radiator, and Sarah had strapped some kind of idol to the front grill, which apparently acted as a supernatural battering ram.

Greg didn’t even have the first clue what they did to the transmission, but low gear was now apparently “climb,” 2nd gear was now “amphibious mode,” and 4th gear was now “ramming speed.” Considering the car’s automatic transmission had only been built with only three forward gears, Greg felt it was better not to dwell too much on that particular mystery. 

And of course there was also the threats. Sarah still claimed that a good blow from a tire-iron fixed most of the car’s problems. 

However, it was only after he woke up from a nightmare where he had been run down by a tormented and enraged car that needed his life-force to sustain its existence, that he realized something needed to be done about the car. Especially before it could achieve sentience and seek revenge upon the world for everything David and Sarah had put it through. 

It didn’t help that Greg’s knowledge of magic was limited at best, so he really had no idea what it took to make something sentient. Nor did he really understand what David and Sarah had actually done to keep the car running. Or what they still had left to try. 

If he had, he would have been a whole lot more scared. 

\---

With David and Sarah in Madagascar, Greg had his chance to do what needed to be done. It was a good thing he was keyed into their wards, because he didn’t fancy his chances otherwise. 

David and Sarah were very protective of their home and every year seemed to bring some new set of horrifying additions to their defensive wards. Greg didn’t know what exactly that entailed, but considering some of the things they had done to the car, he didn’t dare imagine what they would do to an intruder they actually wanted to hurt. 

He was able to buy the cats’ disinterest with a can of tuna for each of them. Isa had to come up to feed them anyway, so he figured at the very least he’d save his wife a trip. Thankfully, it didn’t appear that David or Sarah had booby trapped the garage the same way they had booby trapped their back door, spare key, and garden shed. It said a lot about how much they actually valued the car. 

Once inside the garage, he got to work. He didn’t dare touch any of the spellwork already on the car. First, he didn’t know enough about magic to even know what he was doing. Second David and Sarah would know instantly if someone had messed with their handiwork. So he stuck to the mechanical and electrical components which he knew well, and more importantly, were as mystifying to David and Sarah as quantum metaphysics were to Greg. 

The first thing he sabotaged was the transmission, what was left of it anyway. He drained out all the transmission fluid and poured sand into the gearbox. He also made sure to disconnect the drive-shaft. He didn’t want to get David or Sarah hurt, so it was better that the car not be able drive at all. Just to make sure, he also poured sand into the wheel bearings as well. 

The next logical thing to sabotage was the engine. But according to David the engine was lying on the side of the highway in Arizona. He didn’t dare touch the makeshift totem that was now apparently powering the car, so he settled for anything he could get. The battery was already a lost cause and, Greg suspected, largely redundant at this point. He did disconnect the alternator and remove the internal workings from the distributor. It was anything’s guess how much good that would actually do, considering the car now had no spark-plugs. But Greg figured every little bit counted. He disconnected the ignition, and cut all the wires to the motor. Slowly and systematically, he worked his way through the car. The only thing he left alone was the brakes, the paranoid part of his mind worried that David and Sarah might still get the car working again and would need the brakes.

Still, by the time he was done, he was satisfied that he had finally put an end to the car. David and Sarah would have to get a new car of course, but they were overdue for one anyway. As long as he was pro-active, Greg figured, he could at least stop them from needing to make so many magical repairs and keep things from getting this bad again. 

At the very, very least, he could keep them from creating a monster that prowled the roadways looking for fresh blood to sustain itself.

\---

Greg first though he was hallucinating when David and Sarah’s car pulled up to the Stanley Pines Memorial Library of the Supernatural. The car sounded worse than ever. While it wasn’t loud, Greg’s automotively tuned ears could hear the sand grinding in the gearbox and wheel bearings. 

“Sorry I’m late!” Sarah called as she climbed out. “We had some car troubles this morning. Car was completely dead. Wouldn’t start, wouldn’t move.”

“Oh?” Isa said, casting a quick look at Greg. “You obviously managed to get it working again.”

“Yeah,” Sarah sighed. “It was close. We couldn’t figure out what was wrong at first or how we might get it moving again. We actually thought it was dead for good this time, and we’d have to get a new car. Then David pointed out that zombies were dead, and they still moved.”

The bottom dropped out of Greg’s stomach. He clutched the edge of the counter as the implications of what Sarah just said hit him. 

“So I dug out some of my old viteology and necromancy textbooks from that elective I took in university. Found this perfectly good necromantic ritual. We had to modify it a bit to make it work for cars, but that wasn’t too big of a challenge,” Sarah continued. “The thing most people don’t realize is that bringing the dead back to life is really easy if you’re not concerned with things like sentience, appearance, or good physical and mental health. But hey, it’s a car. It never had a mental state in the first place and we’ve never cared too much how it looked. Took us five minutes to do the ritual and the car started up just like that. Ran a bit slow though, but zombies aren’t exactly known for their speed. Still, this will save us a lot of grief if the car ever dies again and… Greg? Are you okay? You’re looking pale!”

**Author's Note:**

> Oh... and if anyone wants to know. Greg was right. The car outlives David and Sarah and now prowls the roadways of North America, running down evil-doers to sustain its own unholy existence and searching for its next owner, who hopefully knows more about cars and less about magic. 
> 
> It's still terrified of David and Sarah's reincarnations though.


End file.
